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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

I would like to tell the writer: "Cool story bro, nice job on all the research and kudos on your effort, but you're confusing the cause/effect."

It's not that "rich people work so much", it's that "people who work much tend to be rich".

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Having seen how hard many poor people above the age of thirty work.... I'd disagree quite heavily with this assertion. Would be interesting to see the reasons.

My hunch would be more in line with much of the "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations. It takes surprisingly little money to lounge playing video games when you don't have a car/house payments.

I'd be inclined to say that the middle class work differently than the poor, and the rich work differently than the middle class. Working hard is the difference between middle class and upper middle class, or between upper class and upper upper class.

> Having seen how hard many poor people above the age of thirty work....

so agree with you!

poor people often work even more than rich because their salary is low and they have to take extra hustle just to make the ends meet.

Getting a decent salary, which allows getting out of poverty, may free up quite a lot of time.

> "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations

agree again :) I think they just carry take a lot on their shoulders just because they like to (thus they "have managed to over leverage themselves ")

What I've seen is a little more nuanced. People who front-load their effort by doing well from high school through grad school or early career get a cushier life after 35. This contrasts with those who don't put in as much effort in their late childhood and early adulthood who then need a much more solid work ethic post 35 to get a worse result.

That's an enormous assertion that sounds very classist. Have anything to back it up?

Let me ask you a question:

Take 100 rich people and ask them "how hard did you work to get there?", do you think most of them will say "haha i didn't work hard at all! You don't need to work hard to get rich!"

My point was, all other conditions being equal, the people who try hard in their life tend to be more successful that the ones that don't.

Which is why if you take the rich people set and observe how much they work, it is obviously going to be that they work hard.

It sounds classist only if you interpret it that way.

That may be true, but if you take the set of all people who have worked hard, not all of them will be rich. Being a hard worker is not a requirement to be rich and there are certainly people who are rich not through any hard work of their own (inheritances, for instance). To paint everyone who is poor as likely being lazy is insulting.

Where did I say poor people are lazy? I keep getting downvoted for this comment, but in my opinion the ones who downvote me are the ones being classist for interpreting it that way. This is basic "logic 101" man, "If you work hard, you have high chance of becoming rich" does not equal to "If you are poor, you have high chance of being lazy".

The world's working poor plainly contradict your assertion.

The article is not talking about how hard it is for poor people to get rich. It's talking about precisely the rich people set.

And I'm simply saying, if you take 100 rich people and ask how they got there, majority of them would have gotten there because they worked hard.

Let's save the "poor people have hard time becoming rich and the world is a fucked up place" argument for another day. In fact I even agree with you on that part. I'm just criticizing the logical flaw in the article.

> And I'm simply saying, if you take 100 rich people and ask how they got there, majority of them would have gotten there because they worked hard.

I'm pretty sure, yes, if you asked 100 rich people, they would say that, the question is whether that attribution is accurate.

I'd suspect that it is true in some respect (specifically, if by "working hard" you mean "spending time in activities directed at getting rich"; there is plenty of hard work people do that isn't directed at getting rich) if you compare them to less-rich people with similar starting conditions. I think, though, that starting conditions and factors outside of the individuals' control are pretty big contributors to becoming rich.

So I guess those Chinese making your gadgets in 18h factory shifts are all billionaires by now.

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